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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Why Ukrainians Targeted the Author of “Eat, Pray, Love”
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Why Ukrainians Targeted the Author of “Eat, Pray, Love”
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You're listening to the political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker.
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C
Hey everybody, it's Liz, if you happen to be watching.
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B
This month, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert announced a new book to readers who only know her as the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Its subject may be surprising the true.
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C
Story of this extraordinary family who managed to hide in the Siberian wilderness for half a century without any human contact.
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B
But after the announcement, Gilbert got some very strong feedback from her Ukrainian readers.
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C
Over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now, any book, no matter what the subject of it is that is set in Russia.
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B
She decided to withdraw the book in support of Ukraine. Aleph Batimon is a novelist and a scholar of comparative literature. She recently wrote an essay for the New Yorker titled Rereading Russian in the Shadow of the Ukraine War. It was inspired by a trip she took to Ukraine, where she learned how the war torn Slavic world really feels about writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. We sat down to talk about Elizabeth Gilbert's dilemma and about the inflammatory politics of the great Russian novels. So, yeah, thank you so much, Elif, for coming on. I really appreciate it.
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C
Oh, thank you. I'm happy to be here.
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B
So, you know, regarding the Elizabeth Gilbert controversy, there's something that just feels like strangely unnuanced about it to me. Like if you look at what the Snow Forest is supposed to be about, it's set in the 20th century in Siberia and it focuses on a Russian family that has removed themselves from society in the 1930s to try and resist the Soviet government, which doesn't really sound like a pro Russia novel or even something that would necessarily be problematic, you know, even, you know, during the war in Ukraine. And so I'm wondering, does this feel like a, a kind of weird one off controversy to you, or are we really at the point where we're just protesting books because they're set in Russia? Like, is this indicative of, like where the literary movement is at, or should we be looking at it in a different way?
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C
Yeah, that, that seems like the question. So my, my understanding of what happened is that Elizabeth Gilbert, who has a massive world, her Ukrainian fans started review bombing her new book on Goodreads without having read it, just knowing that it's set in Russia and maybe knowing what you just said about when and where. So I think the question is who we is? I guess I think of this as a trauma response. It's not even about triggering a trauma that's over. It's something that's still going on now. And I've been trying to think of an explanation that would make it sort of clearer to people in the US because we tend to see things differently if we're from a large powerful country versus a small country with a history of invasions. And the United States does not have a history of being invaded or colonized by outside forces. So it's really hard to relate to or to immediately understand this existential trauma panic, this fear of annihilation, that the response that you see in the Western press, where you see people really getting angry at Elizabeth Gilbert and being, you know, that she's an enemy of free speech and that she's canceled herself. I mean, to me, what it looked like was she feels love and gratitude to her readers and she sees that a group of them is experiencing pain and she wants to do something to address that. The canceling idea is an Extremely unhelpful idea that also comes from trauma. So, like, the thing isn't, like, okay, this book is actually participating in some way with the rhetoric of empire, the rhetoric of war, the rhetoric of oppression. The conclusion that you should draw from that isn't, oh, whoever wrote it is, like, stupid and evil and blind, and they shouldn't be allowed to have a voice anymore. It's become like, those are the two options. Either there's absolutely. The text isn't participating in imperialism or in war in any way, or the. The author is a blameworthy person who should now be suppressed, and it's this completely false dichotomy that just keeps people sort of in these circular, angry arguments and that enables the cycle of trauma to continue. And I think a much more productive way of looking at it would be like, well, okay, let's see, what is it? These people are clearly upset. What is it in these works that has made these people upset? How can we, like, incorporate that into our writing and our thinking to make it, like, richer and to consider all of the sides more and more? I think in this particular case, Elizabeth Gilbert had already written the book, and I guess it seemed to her like, oh, at this point, I can't rewrite the whole book right now fast enough to speak to these concerns from readers, but I can postpone the publication and think about what to do next. I think that that's that kind of response.
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B
So going back to the classic Russian novels that you wrote about in your piece earlier this year, there's like, a line that's sort of been used that's like, putin isn't Pushkin. You know, it's, you know, Putin's the problem, not Pushkin.
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C
But it's like, Putin not Pushkin.
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B
I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more about, like, the expansionist rhetoric that's present in. In these books.
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C
Yeah, so my whole introduction to the idea of Ukrainian people wanting to restrict access to Russian books was it came from 2019, which was the first time that I went to Ukraine, and I was actually on my way to Russia to present my own first book, which had just been translated into Russian, which is about the Russian classics. So then I, you know, like, Ukraine was sort of added as a stop. And, you know, my work hadn't been translated into Ukrainian. And so I was sort of. But I was doing some kind of publicity stuff there. And I was just sort of introduced as, like, oh, here's this writer who is a Turkish American person who wrote two books, and one is called The Possessed and one is called the Idiot, which are both Dostoevsky titles. And that's really, like, all they knew about me. So the interviews would be like, wait, what? You know, are you obsessed with Dostoevsky? Like, what's going on here? And that was sort of my first introduction to this feeling that these, particularly the classics, the Russian classic, the 19th century Russian classics, were part of this language of empire and of the Russian state and of Russian greatness that people in Ukraine already in 2019 experienced as an existential threat. They had already just had this stuff in 2014 with Crimea, and there was ongoing war already in the Donbas region. There was this sense of a Russian invasion being imminent and of that invasion justifying itself to itself within Russia and also to the rest of the world, in part through the story about the great eternal Russian literature and it being universal and it being not political, like, it. You know, because I think people in Ukraine are very aware of the kind of argument that comes up in response to their critique of Russian literature, which is like, you know, what are you talking about? These books have nothing to do with politics. Dostoevsky was in a prison camp for all of this time. Like, how can you be so stupid and conflate Dostoevsky with Putin? Like, they're very obviously aware of that. And I've come to see that kind of argument as a kind of gaslighting of Ukraine, in part because, like, we. And I say this as, like, the Western liberal media. We, like Russia, come from a legacy of cultural imperialism and political intervention in other countries to. To a much greater extent than we have a history of other countries inter intervening in our situation or being. Or colonizing us or, you know, pushing their cultural products on us. Yeah. Does that make sense?
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B
No, it does. I mean, you said a lot of interesting things. I feel like a lot of readers probably, you know, like, when I was reading, like, Dostoevsky when I was a teenager, I don't know if I ever. If it really ever crossed my mind that, like, there was a world in which, like, a lot of people would say that this is, like, you know, essentially propaganda or that this rhetoric is indicative of, like, a larger political worldview. I feel like I was much more attuned to, like, the religious elements. And I don't know, I feel like it just like. Like, it's embarrassing to say on, like, a podcast for the New Yorker, but, like, it kind of went over my head. And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, like, what that rhetoric looks like. And whether you think that it's something that, you know, obviously, like, Ukrainian readers are very attuned to it because they're talking about it now and protesting these books. But whether. Do you get the sense that a lot of people, especially in America, are kind of just, like, unaware of it, or am I, like, uniquely naive?
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C
No, no, no. I mean, I share all of the feelings that you said. I was completely unaware. I was not just unaware of the political component. When I read Dostoevsky as a young person, I was. I mean, I was a young person, I suspect, sometime earlier than you were. And, you know, it was still. There was still this kind of Cold War,'90s end of history mentality where there was a way of teaching literature and looking at literature as being like, this is an alternative to politics. This is like, this is universal, great art that transcends all petty political concerns. And I share the feeling that you said, which is like, when you said, I feel embarrassed to say it went over my head. I felt by 2019, I'd already done a PhD in Comparative Literature, mostly in Russian literature, and I just hadn't. And to not have thought about this stuff at all was so. It felt so embarrassing and so kind of shameful. But I think that what that's a sign of is not that we should actually be embarrassed or ashamed, but a sign that how we read and how we consume texts is so determined by what time period we're in, what discourse we're in. And that was something that, like, the imperialistic content and the political content of these great universal books is something that in the US in particular, and I think in a lot of the Western world and Western Europe, it's just not. It was not taught in literature classes. It was not considered. In 2019, after I had this experience in Ukraine, I went back and I read Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, which is an older book from the 90s. So obviously these ideas were there, but they weren't in the mainstream. And reading that book, I really understood. So you brought up Dostoevsky and how as a teenager, you read Dostoevsky and you're not thinking, wow, how does this book make Ukrainian and Polish people feel threatened and feel like it's propaganda for Russia? So the story with Dostoevsky is actually the thing that people are angry about, is a lot more about his political writing and his personal views. So outside of his novelistic life, especially in his later career, he became very reactionary, pro Russian nationalist. He was against the independence of Poland and, of course, against the independence of Ukraine. He thought all of the Slavic people should speak Russian. He thought that the other Slavic languages were not actually languages and they were more kind of dialects of Russian. And he thought that it was Russia's destiny was to rise up like Christ against Europe and sort of assert the universality of man. And the universal man was sort of this, like, Russian person.
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B
So you would say that, I guess, like, these sort of controversial, expansionist ideas are more present in his, like, political writing rather than in his novels.
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C
Yeah, yeah, they're more present in his political writing. And then what Edward Said does in Cultural and Imperialism, he shows that there's this tendency that we have to say, oh, well, you know, what he said in his political work actually has nothing to do with his novels. And to keep those things completely separate, and. And Said proposed doing this new kind of reading of novels that's looking at novels for how they normalize and reify the kind of political ideas that are current in the time that they're being written. So I think a said reading of a Dostoevsky novel, especially a novel like Demons, for example, which has a character who voices a lot of reactionary messianic views, he would say, how does the production of those books and making those books the way that we experience them, as great literature and as literature that defines Russia and that defines what we think of as the novel in general, how does it actually uphold these power structures and hierarchies of different languages and people? I think if you look in those terms, it's very easy to see how many of the 19th century classics normalize the idea that Russia is and somehow deserves to be. And it's normal and fitting and sort of beyond comment for it to have the status that it has in the Slavic world.
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B
You mentioned Tolstoy, who was famously a pacifist. Is he kind of, like, immune to some of the criticisms that are now swirling about other classic Russian writers?
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C
I think it's like, it might be more useful, or the way that I look at it now is more that it's kind of a structural issue of writing within a certain political structure at a certain historical time is more salient than what your personal view was. You know, like, if you look at Anna Karenina, there's actually. There's all kinds of stuff about, like, Vronsky, as he turns down this commission to go to Uzbekistan, which was to Tashkent, which was the Russian empire, was newly expanding its activities there. He doesn't go there. Instead, he gets together with Anna and they go to Italy. But Then at the end of the book, when his love relationship with Anna goes terribly wrong, he joins a volunteer detachment to to again serve the interests of the Russian Empire, this time in Serbia fighting the Ottomans. I think one Ukrainian critic said about Annika. And there's always a war in which an upset Russian person can go to destroy themselves and destroy non Russian people as an outlet. That's always a direction that the plot can take. Did Tolstoy think that was good? Did he think it was bad? It's almost not relevant. The important thing is that it wasn't talked about and it should be talked about. And to not only not talk about it, but to also say it's completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with what's going on is like infuriating to people and is creating various problems that we could talk our way through, I think.
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B
Coming up, Elif Bateman on the future possibilities of political fiction.
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KATIE I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good.
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I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech. Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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B
I'm glad that you mentioned Anna Karenina, because in your essay there's a really interesting part where you talk about how one of the best things about that book or the thing that sort of attracted you to it initially was just that there's this unbelievable moral complexity where it's like no character is ever totally wrong, even when they're doing something that, you know, is, you know, almost like objectively unreasonable. Like they have their reasons for doing it. And I think later on you write that ambiguity itself can kind of be seen as political. And so I'm wondering if you could talk about just like the politics of ambiguity.
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C
It's so funny. I was on an airplane yesterday and I was watching an episode of Veep and the Selena. The Julia Louis Dreyfus character was saying something like, completely obviously corrupt. And someone called her on it, like her daughter calls her on it. And she's like, you don't understand how nuanced it is. And she just kept insisting on how nuanced it is. And it's true that when we talk about things being very nuanced or very ambiguous or being like, wow, it's such a complicated human. That argument is often made on the side of power and on the side of the status quo, which is. Is kind of a. It's a difficult thing to think about. Like, Oksana Zabushka, who's a Ukrainian writer, has this. She's like, all of Russian literature is this like 200 year long festival of understanding the perspective of perpetrators rather than victims. And of, you know, Dostoevsky's being like, oh God, how awful things were for this poor murderer who had to then kill this old woman. Or even in Tolstoy where he's like this very humane act that he's doing of like showing that nobody's actually completely wrong from their own perspective can have this political corollary of at the end you finish the book and you think like, wow, I guess there was nothing that anyone could have done to make things different because it was so complicated and nobody was actually acting badly. And there's a kind of defeatism that can come from this like, artistic harmony, which I definitely don't think is a sign that we need to stop trying to be complex or we need to be less complex or be less. I think it's like we actually have to be more, more nuanced than to actually think about how what view about change and about the potentials of action are implied by the kind of like interior, the portrayal of interiority in different novels, which I actually think is a really exciting way of looking at literature going forward. And it could be used to sort of expand the possibilities of the novel rather than to shut them down and, and cancel and ban and things like that. So I think we should be looking for the expansive side. I was just thinking that like, the only way that I found around it is to like be sort of relentlessly first person and from my own perspective. And I just think only more. Only more description and more transparency.
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B
Yeah, I was curious to hear how some of these conversations have changed the way that you think about your own writing and you know, you approach your writing and you kind of already answered that. But I'm wondering also how these discussions and sort of like revisiting all of these Russian classics in a modern context, how it's changed the way that, that you read, whether you find yourself just like more attuned to those political nuances, or whether you feel more of, like, a. A burden as a reader to, like, be reading, you know, and sort of, like, looking for those things, scrutinizing a book in a way that you might not have back when you thought that it was just about universal truths.
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C
Yeah. I mean, I just want to emphasize that these ideas are so. For a lot of us, myself included, they're so new, and they're changing so fast. And, you know, even if the ideas themselves aren't new and that, you know, people in Ukraine and Poland knew about them for a long time, you know, they're in the mainstream in a new way. And the literary landscape is changing so fast that I find that my mode of reading is also changing. I think it's impossible to avoid the feeling of. When you first discover that something that you've consumed and enjoyed has been causing pain to other people is to feel, like, shame and blame and to be like, God, I was so stupid. And then to be like, oh, my God. So this writer who I really admired was actually kind of like, a callous person. And, like. I don't know. I do a lot of reading on Kindle now, which lets you see what you underlined at different places. Places. And I'm rereading some of Proust in search of lost time. And I can see that I read it for the first time maybe, like, two or three years ago, and I've underlined everything that he says that has any kind of imperialistic content. And I think my mode, when I was underlining it was sort of like, look how pervasive this is. Look how much Proust allowed himself to buy into this. It's hard to say because it's just underlining, but I feel sort of looking back, as if they were kind of like flamey underlinings. I also felt a little bit more like, well, so should I not be reading these things that perpetuate these ideas that I'm not in favor of? And by now, I've kind of ended up in a sort of different direction where I'm more interested in understanding why everyone held the ideas that they held. And so it's been this, like, constant rereading things that I used to really love and feeling really conflicted about them and feeling like I didn't like them anymore. And then, you know, to actually. To write this piece for the New Yorker, I had to reread a bunch of Pushkin and read a bunch of his diary, and they just made me feel so sympathetic towards Pushkin. And to, you know, you just really see the extent to which the writer in his or her time is often trying to do their best and to, like, make sense of all the different things that are going on and they can't see things that they can't see. And it made me sort of more accepting of some of the now sort of politically unsavory points of his work that have been brought up.
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B
I feel like it's so hard to pass, like, a purity test or like a politics test in the time that you're writing, let alone pass it decades later.
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C
Yeah, I think almost like the purity test that I came up with after writing the New Yorker story was like. And this kind of comes from Said. And the kind of analysis that. That he does also like. Sayyid doesn't talk about Russian novels. He talks about English and French novels. And there's, like, an analysis that he does of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen's Mansfield park, where he's like, well, actually, a lot of the money for Mansfield park turns out to actually come from the slave plantation in Antigua. And if you read between the lines, you can actually tell that Sir Thomas Bertram, like Fanny's sort of mentor, probably went to quash a slave rebellion in Antigua. And then he comes back and shuts down the amateur theater. And it's really like the slave economy is really deeply embedded in there, just like it was really deeply embedded in the, you know, in the English state and in the economy that made, you know, novels possible. And the way that, you know, great literature happened, the novels that we consider great and apolitical, they tended to be produced in these countries that had enough wealth to produce them. And the way that they got that wealth was often through these exploitative means. And what Saeed shows is that even in a book like Mansfield park, you can see Jane Austen to the extent to which she's able, she's kind of, like, wrestling with it. You know, like, if Jane Austen was completely cool with, like, you know, slavery on the plantations, we wouldn't even know that happened for Mansfield Park. You know, she could have just left it out. She could have not noticed it. And what I came away from thinking is like, the purity test for me is, does the writer from that time invite us now to see things that the writer was not able to see at the time? Like, did they give us a. Did they give us a means to have a richer view than they had personally? And I found that to be the case of all of the writers who I loved when I was younger, including Dostoevsky I found that despite whatever painful things there were to see, there were places in the text where I could see him pushing for a more generous interpretation than even he was able to have at the time.
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B
You know, Absolutely. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about where the idea of like Russian literature sort of being like uniquely able to speak to universal human truths comes from. Like, do you think it comes from this, the moral ambiguity that you were speaking about earlier? Like, where did that originate?
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C
That's such an interesting question. That's so interesting. I haven't really thought about it. I mean, the history of Russian literature is. It starts in the 18th and 19th century and it's very much informed by English and French literature. Specifically the novels are sort of informed by English and French novels, but they're readapted for a new place. And there's something about abstracting the novel from England and France and applying it to this completely new reality that makes the novel form feel very kind of like portable and exciting and actually universal because it's just been applied to a completely different economic and social reality than the one that it started in. So I imagine that that's. And that's something that actually Dostoevsky already talks about is like when he's talking about Russia being the most Russian being the most universal culture, he's talking about the reforms of Peter the Great and how Peter the Great sort of like westernized Russia and made it like the West. And in that way Russia had to go through this process of thinking about what was really essential about itself and what could be changed. And that sort of made Russia truly universal. So I think that might be part of it. I would guess that the idea of Russian literature as universal also must be to some extent in the U.S. a Cold War idea and must come from the idea of the pre revolutionary literature being like the great apolitical literature and sort of like by comparison with Stalinist literature and Socialist realism, which is just kind of using it as a hammer to hit Soviet literature with. Yeah, that's a great question.
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B
It's weird sometimes how we all have this idea of something and then we're not even quite sure when it began or where it came from.
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C
Yeah, I think there's also like the Dostoevsky novels are very long and like the names of the characters are very weird. And I think somehow I think that this also goes to the Soviet time. There's this idea of Russian ness that's associated with rigor, which I think also comes from like the Russian chess program and the, you know, Soviet supremacy in the Olympics. And there's this idea of the Russian novel as something that's, like, really challenging. And if you're, like, extra smart, then you like to read Russian literature. I don't know. I think that might have something to.
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B
Do with that, honestly. You're right. I mean, the titles alone, like Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, it's like. It's just kind of a signal that these are going to be books that talk about the, like, big universe. Yeah, exactly.
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C
Yeah. And the Russian Soul. I mean, the Russian soul is a saying that appears in these novels that's like. I don't think you've. You don't read a Dickens novel and find them talking about the English soul. That's not like.
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B
Yeah, you mentioned earlier sort of like, you know, that there's a possibility here that this might lead to better art in the sense that there are these, like, expansive possibilities in terms of, like, being more transparent, including more of what we see. Just trying to kind of showing the reader how the writer is grappling with the same, you know, issues that the reader is grappling with. And I'm wondering if you've read anything about Russia and Ukraine or from Russia and Ukraine recently that, you know, kind of falls into that category of, like, this just is, like an open. Like, this is someone who's really dealing with this and, you know, just being transparent about their experience. Like, if you've seen, I guess, fiction already kind of drift in that direction, or whether this is just, like, a hope for the future that hasn't yet been realized.
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C
Well, I mean, I think Serhi Jadan's novel the Orphanage is quite clear. It's like the narrator is this person who really does not want to be political and does not want to be involved and is just like, I just want to get on this bus and go from here to there and, like, live my life. And then gets pulled into this whole political situation against his will. There's a book called Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Bielorussets, I think, which is sort of photo essays. I think that there's a trend in Russian and Ukrainian literature towards creative nonfiction. You see people really, like, on the spot in what feels like real time, trying to make meaning of what's going on around them. That said, I also feel like this is something that I feel kind of conflicted about. Just in the history of, literally, literature in general is that, how did Tolstoy write Anna Karenina? Like, he was a landed aristocrat. Who had this, like his house had its own house that he could sit in and not talk to anyone, and he had all these servants. And great literature and literary innovation often tends to be a product of a lot of material and emotional support that people who are living through a time of war don't necessarily have so many. I think there could be a lag until we see things expanding.
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B
That makes sense. Well, thank you so much.
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C
Thank you.
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B
Elif Bateman is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is the author of two novels and of the memoir the Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them. This has been the political Scene. Hi, I'm Tyler Foggitt. The show is produced by Michelle Moses with editing help from Catherine Winter. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Enjoy the rest of your week and we'll see you next Wednesday.
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I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good.
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B
I'm a senior senior correspondent at Wired.
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C
And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about.
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B
The people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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C
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics. Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode from prx.